Marcus Terentius Varro

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Marcus Terentius Varro lived from 116 to 27 BC, a span that took him from the late Roman Republic into the earliest years of the Empire. Petrarch, writing more than fourteen centuries after Varro's death, called him "the third great light of Rome" - placing him behind only Virgil and Cicero. That ranking came from a medieval Italian poet who could read almost nothing Varro had actually written. Nearly all of it was gone. Quintilian had called him "the most learned of the Romans." Plutarch described him as "a man deeply read in Roman history." Modern scholar Bertha Tilly wrote that Varro "towers above all his contemporaries and his successors." And yet, of an estimated 74 works spread across some 620 books, exactly one survives complete. How does a man become ancient Rome's greatest scholar while leaving almost no paper trail? What did he actually write? And how did fragments of his thinking quietly shape the way universities taught knowledge for more than a thousand years?

• 2. A Life Between Armies

  ›

  Varro was born in or near Reate, the town now called Rieti in Lazio. His family was thought to be of equestrian rank, and he kept ties to that region his entire life - owning a large farm on the Reatine plain, reportedly near Lago di Ripasottile, well into old age. His political career followed the standard path of Roman public service: tribune of the people, quaestor, curule aedile, and finally praetor. He supported Pompey throughout, and that loyalty would cost him dearly. When the First Triumvirate formed around 60 BC, Varro apparently found the arrangement so distasteful that he mocked it outright. He wrote a work called the Three-Headed Monster, a title that requires no explanation. It is cited in Appian's Civil Wars under its Greek name, Trikaranos. The political ridicule likely ended any chance of the consulship. By 59 BC, however, Varro was serving on the commission of twenty men tasked with carrying out Caesar's major agrarian resettlement scheme in Capua and Campania - working alongside the man whose coalition he had just lampooned. When Caesar's civil war broke out in 49 BC, Varro commanded one of Pompey's armies in the Ilerda campaign. Pompey lost. Varro needed pardons - two of them, granted by Julius Caesar, one before and one after the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC. Caesar then appointed him, in 47 BC, to oversee Rome's public library. That appointment would not last. Caesar was killed in 44 BC, and Mark Antony placed Varro on the proscription lists. Varro lost much of his property. He lost his library. He survived.

• 3. The Scholar Under Augustus

  ›

  After the proscription and the chaos of the late Republic, Varro found his footing under the new order. As the Republic gave way to the Empire around 27 BC, he gained the favour of Augustus, and under that protection he found the stability to write. He had studied under the Roman philologist Lucius Aelius Stilo, who died in 74 BC, and later traveled to Athens to study under the Academic philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, who died in 68 BC. Those two teachers gave him grounding in both Latin philology and Greek philosophy. By the time he was writing in earnest, Varro turned out more than 74 Latin works across an extraordinary range of subjects. In around 37 BC, deep in old age, he wrote on farming for his wife Fundania, producing what was described as a "voluminous" work on the management of large slave-run estates - a subject he knew from direct experience on the Reatine plain. That work, De re rustica, is the only complete text he left behind. His surviving fragments appear in scattered places, but most come through Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights. Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Virgil in the Georgics, Columella, Macrobius, Augustine, and Vitruvius all acknowledged him as a source. Vitruvius credits him specifically, at VII.Intr.14, with a book on architecture.

• 4. Nine Arts, Seven Centuries

  ›

  Among Varro's lost works, the Nine Books of Disciplines stands out for what it set in motion. Varro chose the liberal arts as his organising principle and identified nine of them: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. That list did not survive the Middle Ages intact. Working through Martianus Capella's allegory from the early fifth century AD, later writers trimmed Varro's nine down to seven, dropping medicine and architecture. Those seven became the classical "liberal arts" of the medieval schools - the curriculum that structured European university education for centuries. Pliny the Elder, who lived from around 23 to 79 AD, used Varro's Nine Books as a direct model for his own encyclopedic work. The chain from Varro to Capella to medieval scholars is one of the more consequential transmission lines in the history of Western education, and it ran almost entirely through a book no one can now read in full.

• 5. The Farmer Who Saw Microbes

  ›

  De re rustica, Varro's farming manual written for his wife Fundania, has been assessed by historians as "the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records." Among the practical advice on managing large slave-run estates, one passage stands apart. Varro warned readers to avoid building near swamps and marshland. His reason was not superstition. He wrote that in such places "there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases." That sentence, from the first century BC, anticipates the germ theory of disease by roughly nineteen centuries. Scholars note it as a striking early gesture toward microbiology and epidemiology. The manuscripts of De re rustica have their own complicated history. J. G. Schneider and Heinrich Keil established that all surviving copies descend from a single lost manuscript called the Marcianus, once held at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. Petrus Victorinus described it as liber antiquissimus et fidelissimus - the oldest and most faithful book. The oldest existing manuscript is the Codex Parisinus 6842, written in Italy before the end of the 12th century. The first printed edition appeared at Venice in 1472, and Angelo Politian's collation of the Marcianus against his copy of that printing remains an important scholarly witness to the text.

• 6. A Chronology in Stone

  ›

  Ritschl estimated Varro's total output at 74 works in some 620 books, which makes the near-total loss even harder to absorb. Among the works that did leave a permanent mark is the Varronian chronology - Varro's attempt to set down an exact year-by-year account of Roman history up to his own time. He built it on the traditional sequence of consuls of the Roman Republic, inserting "dictatorial" and "anarchic" years where the consul list had gaps. Scholars have since shown it contains errors. It became the standard chronology anyway, largely because it was inscribed on the arch of Augustus in Rome. That arch no longer stands. But a substantial portion of the chronology survived under the name of the Fasti Capitolini. Among the long list of Varro's known lost works is the Menippean Satires, which ran to 150 books, and the Antiquities of Human and Divine Things, which ran to 41 books. His De lingua latina, on the Latin language, originally filled 25 books; six of them, books V through X, survive, some partially damaged. The Logistoricon ran to 76 books. The sheer scale of what is gone makes the single surviving complete work - the farming manual written for Fundania in around 37 BC - feel both precious and faintly absurd as a representation of what "the most learned of the Romans" actually produced.